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There’s just something about the classics.
When I was a young child, me and about a million other so-called “monster kids” would thrill to Saturday afternoon and late-night viewings of Universal’s legendary monster movies from the 1930s and 40s. In those pre-VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, On Demand and streaming days, we took what we could get when we could get it; a dog-eared copy of the TV Guide was our Holy Bible and we were its disciples as we eagerly scoured the listings attempting to locate any and all showings of classic black and white horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, House of Dracula, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and a multitude more of those gems. Usually we’d luck out with station WGN out of Chicago which, in the late 1970s and early 80s had a reputation for showing chopped up versions of our favorite scary flicks, always inundated with excruciatingly long commercial breaks in-between the frightful action of our ghouls and Ghoulies. None of that mattered, though. In fact, those commercial spots became a part of our weekend horror watching and are now as ingrained in our DNA as Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula or Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein Monster. It was a good time to be a kid.
Among those myriad of horrors fell a most peculiar sort of movie, this one starring the great Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Rains. Directed by Curt Siodmak, 1941’s The Wolfman told the tragic story of one Larry Talbot who, upon returning to visit his ancestral digs, gets bitten by a werewolf for his troubles. Of course, once bitten by a werewolf one is doomed to have that curse befall them should they survive their attack. Or, to have a quirky gypsy named Maleva (essayed by the lovely Maria Ouspenskaya) explain it to our reading audience better than I ever could – “Even a man who is pure in heat and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.”
The Wolfman was always a favorite of mine and perhaps because of that early childhood infatuation, I’ve never quite given up on the hopes that one day Hollywood might figure out how to capture lightning in a bottle a second time and deliver a ripping retelling of this classic story. The movie industry attempted just such a thing with two very good actors – Anthony Hopkins and Benicio Del Toro – back in 2010, but it faltered both creatively and in the hearts and minds of filmgoers. Now, according to our fiendish pals over at Bloody Disgusting News, another effort is very much underway to restore to life the curse of The Wolfman…
Initially announced back in 2020, Jason Blum and his prolific production shingle Blumhouse are hard at work on a reinterpretation of The Wolfman, this version set to star talented actor Ryan Gosling as the tortured Larry Talbot. So, what’s the status of that remake as of late 2021?
“We are working on the script, got to get the script right,” Blum explained during an interview with Collider. “Working on trying to get a script that (Ryan Gosling) feels good about and comfortable about and excited about.”
Leigh Whannell, the director behind the recent spin on The Invisible Man, is said to be in negotiations to direct The Wolfman and our respective hats off to this gent if he can somehow pull a neat magic trick of updating the story without losing the magic and pathos inherent in the original Chaney movie.
As for this onetime apostle of Forry Ackerman, Boris Karloff, Dwight Frye and all things that go bump in the night and howl at the moon, I’ll wait out the glacier-like pace of this latest remake with my lovely Blu-Ray transfer of the 1941 film, even though it lacks the wonder of the WGN commercial-laden print I saw way back as a child. After all, there’s just something about the classics that can never be improved upon…
